As tablets, smart phones, and other personal computing devices have become smaller and ever more powerful, their ability to interact wirelessly with other devices in the area has expanded significantly. With the early incorporation of Global Position Satellite (GPS), Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth® technology with cellular telephone capabilities, and the more recent addition of Near Field Communication (NFC) and Bluetooth® LE, mobile computing devices now have a growing range of wireless communication options. One aspect of receiving information relates to receiving information based on proximity to other mobile computing devices or proximity to a particular geographical location.
Proximity based computing has found uses in many fields such as in retail where specific advertisements or promotional events may be automatically sent to a smartphone as the user carries the phone near a specific location (e.g. walking past a store front). Proximity technology may also be used to aid a user in moving around a complex environment such as a convention center, museum, shopping mall, theme park, or cruise ship. The use of proximity based computing may mean the user can obtain the necessary information with little or no user input because the device automatically “knows” the information as the user moves around the environment.
A different example of a complex environment is a manufacturing facility. Production lines in such facilities may produce everything from microchips, aircraft, and automobiles, to hand bags, toys, and prepackaged food. Many such facilities cover thousands or millions of square feet, and may employ thousands of workers. Numerous separate work areas or workstations may be present each configured to perform one or more of the many steps that are often required to produce a finished product. The facilities are commonly enclosed in steel or other metals creating significant electromagnetic interference.
Manufacturers continually seek to find more efficient manufacturing processes to reduce costs and increase profits. Organizations often invest considerable money and effort into developing a large and complex corporate knowledge base containing large amounts of information about the efficiency and profitability of the organization's current and past production processes. Additional effort is often spent analyzing the data to determine what changes in the processes need to be made in order to lower costs and increase productivity.
However, maintaining these efficiency targets may require that supervisors have easy access to the corporate knowledge base as they monitor the activities occurring in the production environment. Also, if conditions change on the manufacturing floor, managers may need to make decisions quickly to avoid a wide array of negative outcomes such as additional expense, wasted materials and resources, production down time, unacceptably low quality in the final product, damage to equipment or facilities, or danger to employees. In many situations, making these decisions may be easier if the manager has access to the data, reports, etc. available in the corporate knowledge base. However, in many cases, access to this information may require leaving the production environment, returning to the manager's office (perhaps hundreds or thousands of feet away), obtaining the information, then returning to the location on the production line to analyze the information and make the decision. This may result in an unacceptable delay.